Why are the sox so unlucky with veteran additions?

[Eminor3rd]

Pollock was sort of unlucky, but he’s had an extremely high-variance career because of his injury history. There was always a good chance he’d bust. 

Kimbrel had already morphed into a risky, lesser version of his prime self that maintained elite stuff but lost all of his control/command. Despite evidence of this, the White Sox bought high on a half season bounceback, and placed him into a role he’d never held. It was a terrible move. You could imagine how it could work, but it was always more likely to fail, and the worst part is they could have just traded less for an already established setup guy in the market instead. 

Encarnacion was not the same after the all star break in 2019. I know this only because I was watching the Yankees every day at the time. I can’t remember if he was coming off of a small injury or something, too — but there was a very clear “before and after” point where he suddenly looked really old and physically different. Normal fans of any other team wouldn’t likely notice, but the Sox scouting staff certainly should have. No excuse for that one.

Josh Harrison was a good player and is now washed up. Everyone seems to have known this except the White Sox. Sometimes old vets  have stretches where they hit well again randomly, it’s called the “dead cat bounce.” I suspect even the Sox knew that a good Harrison was a pipe dream at this point, but they painted themselves into a corner by poorly managing their resources and missing better opportunities to upgrade, so it was all they were left with. Predictably desperate and bad move. 

Mazara was a well established mediocre player that everyone agreed that they thought would be better. If you have a plan for a guy like that, it can be a great gamble on upside that can turn gold, you just have to find a way to open up some ABs to give it a chance to flourish. What you DON’T do is hand the guy an every day role and rely on him as your only option at his position. This was another move that was always way more likely to fail than to succeed, and thus another bad move.

The Sox are the last team left that doesn’t understand how volatile RP performance is, and that you should never buy it at peak value in the offseason market. The time to buy peak RP is at the deadline when you need it to last for 20 more innings (the timing of Kimbrel was right; the player and market evaluations were wrong). These offseason deals are, at best, coin flips to work out well in the short term, nearly guaranteed to bust in the long term. But they keep doing it and it keeps happening. Expect not to hate how maybe one in four or one in five end up. 

My view/point here is that this isn’t bad luck. This is a consistent pattern of bad moves. The Sox repeatedly put themselves in a position where the good outcome is less likely than the bad outcome. It may be true that you’d probably expected for one or two of these to have worked out better just through randomness, but they’d never be enough to turn the tide of the overall trend. 

[GreenSox]

On 6/10/2022 at 8:53 AM, Dominikk85 said:

I get it is not all luck as part of the issue is that jerry won't pay up for the top guys, but the kind of "success" they had in the last couple years is just unreal. 

They buy high for temporary spurts and career years.   Too much trading of young for old. 

The FO has been so bad with  veterans for so long that it's more than just bad luck.

Edited June 13, 2022 by GreenSox